Outages Suffered by Cloud Computing and SaaS Providers

Over the past 18 months there have been an increasing number of high-profile outages amongst providers of cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) vendors.  Application vendors Intuit and Workday both suffered extensive service disruptions, which impacted a broad segment of their user community.  Infrastructure providers have suffered short outages over the past year as well.  Even heavy weights amazon.com and Google each have experienced minor service interruptions demonstrating that no service providers are immune from data center incidents.

Designing Products for the Cloud

This past weekend I had the opportunity to attend the first ever Product Camp DC.  Over 60 marketing professionals attended the event, which was hosted at the Network Solutions office in Herndon, VA.   I presented on the topic of Designing Products for the Cloud – Considerations for Product Managers building on SaaS and Cloud Computing platforms.  There was a healthy discussion during the session as a number of product managers from SaaS, cloud and traditional technology vendors debated the issues. 

Sajak’s Law of Technology Marketing

If you are in the technology sector you are probably familiar with Moore’s law, which describes the exponential advances in computing hardware that have occurred over the past 50 years. Specifically, Gordon Moore, who was one of the co-founders of Intel, observed that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit doubled every two years. There have been several adaptations of Moore’s law in other computing sectors. For example, Butter’s Law describes how the amount of data coming out of an optical fiber doubles every nine months. In this post, I will introduce a new principle in technology marketing which I refer to as Sajak’s law, named after the host of the popular game show Wheel of Fortune.

Wheel of Fortune and Technology Marketing

If you have ever watched Wheel of Fortune, the letters RSTLNE probably have special significance to you. These popular letters are pre-selected for contestants in the bonus round of the game. I think we should adopt a similar practice in the technology sector, in which a certain group of buzzwords are automatically assumed for any vendor.